Texas trembling! Lone Star State hit by 9 earthquakes in 1 day

Nine quakes in less than 24 hours (Tuesday am to early Wednesday morning) have been registered by the US Geological Survey in the North Texas town of Irving, a suburb of Dallas, America’s fourth most populous metropolitan area.

The magnitude of the tremors were measured between 1.6 and 3.6,
with three of them having a magnitude of 3.0 or higher. No damage
to buildings or injuries among locals have been reported.
Geologists say humans generally feel earthquakes with magnitude
stronger than 2.5.

North Texas has suffered a wave of mild quakes over the last
months, but the series on Tuesday was the “largest since the
earthquakes started happening there in the last year,” Jana
Pursley of the US Geological Survey told AP.

North Texas has experienced 25 quakes since late October, nearly
a quarter of all quakes registered in this region since 2008.
Before 2008 there was only one tremor registered in the Fort
Worth Basin that lies beneath the Dallas urban area.

The Lone Star State is oil fracking technology’s birthplace in
the US, and many of the state’s citizens see a direct correlation
between years of intensive fracking oil extraction and
earthquakes becoming increasingly commonplace.

A month ago, Denton, a Texas town of 123,000 north of Dallas,
became the first town in the state to enact a ban on hydraulic
fracturing, more commonly known as fracking. Denton lies on top
of a natural-gas goldmine called the Barnett shale formation,
where the much-maligned oil and gas extraction method started.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) is predicting that over the next
50 years about half the country will have an increased risk of
seismic activity.

While fracking has been linked to increased seismic activity in
states like Oklahoma, Idaho, Ohio and Texas, the USGS said it is
still researching “induced earthquakes,” or those events
that “may be associated with human activities such as the
disposal of wastewater in deep wells.”